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Memoirs of a words whore… 2

That Hemingway wannabe who is pretty much unreadable? Who has developed his own style of writing where no one thinks? Things just happen. People do things. Things happen to them. There’s no motive. There’s no internal dialogue. And all that in an American drawl which renders it pretty much obsolete?

But have you given Blood Meridian a chance?

He himself sums it up, his style of writing.

There’s no mystery. There are no why’s. The internal dialogue is just a way of justification in our lives. If we think we know why someone did that, it gives them some justification. Some humanising.

Oh he raped because he was abused as a child.

Did he? Where does the circle of evil stop?

He has an answer. It stops right there. Where is started.

Cormac Mccarthy doesn’t believe in humanising evil. He lets people commit gruesome murders and skin people alive while you watch, horrified, afraid to turn the page, hoping for redemption, which never comes. All that in the 1840 American wild west in the civil war. The wild west movies are supposedly cool. We like their style, we say. But how was it in real?

He doesn’t say sorry to you. He doesn’t want you to like him or the book. It just is.

Children are hung from trees.

Long before GRRM made cruelty cool, there was Cormac Mccarthy.

Don’t read if you like Jane Austen. Her characters have names. Nuances. You see your failed love stories in them. Darcy and Elizabeth. You root for them.

Mccarthy is anti-Jane Austen. A neutrino to a neutron. Heavy, but not redemptive. His characters don’t have names, they go by the names of The Kid. The Judge. They don’t think. They do.